


Remedial Comfort Foods

by miniaturedragonfly



Series: Advanced Culinary Arts [3]
Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Gen, Post-Episode: s05e05 Geothermal Escapism, Season/Series 05
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-13
Updated: 2020-11-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:42:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27536245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miniaturedragonfly/pseuds/miniaturedragonfly
Summary: Shirley bakes Annie a birthday cake.
Relationships: Shirley Bennett & Annie Edison
Series: Advanced Culinary Arts [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2011546
Kudos: 11





	Remedial Comfort Foods

**Author's Note:**

> The word "remedial" in the title is not intended to be a reference to 3x04 "Remedial Chaos Theory" in any way. Sorry for any confusion.

One day, a week or so after Troy left, Shirley arrived early to school by sheer accident. By some random stroke of luck, she’d hit every green light between her house and Greendale, and somehow managed to miss all the traffic that she usually encountered. When she pulled into the parking lot, she considered waiting in her car for the rest of the group to arrive, but then she realized that she had time to go get a coffee before class, so she headed to the cafeteria.

Coffee in hand, Shirley stopped in the ladies’ room by the student lounge. She still had a couple of minutes to kill, and the lighting in this bathroom was marginally better than the one in the library, making it a perfect place to check her hair and straighten her lipstick.

But as Shirley swung open the door to the bathroom, she heard the unmistakable sound of crying coming from inside. She didn’t have time to reconsider whether she felt like helping a stranger with her problems (which _always_ happened when she happened upon someone who was crying, whether she’d met them before that moment or not), so she pressed her lips together and walked in.

It wasn’t a stranger. It was Annie, squished into the corner furthest from the door, sobbing her little eyes out. She barely seemed to register that somebody had come through the door, and she certainly didn’t realize that it was Shirley who had intruded.

“An-nie?” Shirley cooed, breaking Annie’s name into two lilting syllables. "Why are you crying, pumpkin?” Shirley kept a small distance between herself and Annie, so that Annie could wave her off if she didn’t want to share.

Annie looked up at the sound of her name, and made a halfhearted attempt to swipe the tears off of her face.

“I’m fine, it’s nothing. I’m fine,” she repeated, though tears were still streaming down her cheeks.

“You don’t have to tell me about it if you don’t want to,” Shirley assured her. She _wanted_ to know why Annie was crying, but she wasn’t going to push.

Annie sighed. “Promise you’ll keep this between us?” she pleaded.

Shirley nodded. “Pinky swear?” she offered.

Annie held out her hand, little finger extended. Shirley linked her own pinky with Annie’s and they nodded solemnly at one another. Nobody was quite sure _when_ they had all started taking pinky swears so seriously, but it had become a sacred part of their collective friendship.

When the pinky swear was complete, Shirley gathered her skirt around her and slowly sat down next to Annie on the floor. Sitting on bathroom floors was pretty gross, but Shirley had spent too many years changing diapers to care that much. If Annie needed her to sit on a bathroom floor, then Shirley was going to sit on that bathroom floor with her.

“It’s my birthday,” Annie confessed tearfully.

Shirley frowned. “Annie, you are way too young to be crying on your birthday. Give it ten years, then we can talk.”

“No, not _today_. My birthday was—was yesterday,” Annie explained, beginning to cry harder. “My birthday was yesterday, and nobody remembered. I didn’t want to say anything because we had so much work to get done and I didn’t want to seem selfish. I guess I assumed people would remember, but everyone has their own lives so of course remembering little Annie’s birthday isn’t a priority. I even have everyone’s birthdays marked on the calendar in our kitchen, but Troy _just_ left, so Abed hasn’t really been… noticing things.”

Shirley filed away that bit about Abed, to ask Annie about later when she was no longer crying, but wisely chose to stay focused on helping Annie for now. She pulled a little package of tissues out of her purse and handed them over.

“Thanks,” Annie sniffled. “I know it shouldn’t be important, it’s just like any other day. I’m not a little kid anymore, I shouldn’t even care.”

“But that doesn’t mean you _can’t_ care about it,” Shirley pointed out. “If you want to care about your birthday, that’s your right as an American, just like it’s Jeff’s right to pretend he hasn’t had a birthday since 2004.”

Annie’s tears tapered off for a moment. “Huh. You’re right, I never noticed it before, but he’s never said anything about it one way or the other. You’d think someone as self-centered as Jeff would make a huge deal out of it. I wonder why he doesn’t,” Annie mulled.

“I’ve got some theories,” Shirley muttered. But her discomfort with the way Jeff pretended not to age and then turned around to make googly eyes at Annie could wait.

“But anyway, I can’t say anything about it _now_ ,” Annie sulked. “Then everyone will make a big deal out of it because they feel bad, and it’ll just be embarrassing. So I’m trying to be a grownup and just _deal with it_ , but being a grownup _sucks_ sometimes, so I’m… crying on the bathroom floor about it instead.”

“Being a grownup _does_ suck sometimes,” Shirley agreed. “I think we’ve all learned that lately.”

Shirley and Annie sat in silence for a few minutes, then. Annie had told her story, Shirley had offered all the comfort she had, and there wasn’t much else to say. But then Shirley had an idea.

She pulled her phone out of her purse, carefully angling the screen away from Annie. She peered at it, then said, “Oh no!”

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s And—rea,” Shirley stumbled. She had been planning on faking a text from Andre, saying she needed to handle something at home, and hurrying out—but in her excitement over the plan she’d thought of so hastily, she forgot that Andre was gone. Again.

Annie gave her a quizzical look. Shirley thought fast.

“Andrea,” she repeated. “My neighbor.”

“Oh,” Annie said, unconvinced. “Do you need to take that?”

“Hmm?” Shirley looked down at her phone, which was luckily still facing away from Annie. She hadn’t actually gotten to the part where she explained that it was a text, so Annie must have thought Shirley was getting a phone call. “Oh! Yes, yes, I do.”

“Okay. I’ll see you at the meeting later,” Annie added as Shirley got to her feet.

“Yes, see you later, Annie,” Shirley said as she hurried out the door. If she moved fast enough, she wouldn’t even have to invent a new fake reason for going home.

Just as Shirley reached the door, Annie stopped her with her voice. “Shirley?”

Shirley paused, looked back. “Yes, Annie?”

“Thank you.”

Shirley smiled and nodded once. “Of course, pumpkin,” she replied, and then she was out the door.

She didn’t even bother putting her phone to her ear, knowing that Annie would take a few minutes to fix her makeup before venturing back out into the world. Miraculously, she made it back out to her car and out of the parking lot without encountering anybody else she knew, and drove herself home.

By the time Shirley pulled into her driveway, she knew exactly what she was going to make. She raced around the kitchen, locating, measuring, and combining ingredients in record time. While waiting for the oven timer to go off, she washed the dishes, dried them, and put them away, so there was no mess for her to come back to that evening.  
She missed all her classes that day, but this was more important, so she didn’t mind. Meeting with the Save Greendale Committee, however, took precedence over everything else, so she hurried through the decorating process. It wasn’t her best work of all time, but that was okay. The thought was what counted, today.

Despite her best efforts, Shirley was a few minutes late when she walked through the door. Ordinarily, someone would have said something about it, but the pink-frosted chocolate fudge cake in Shirley’s hands was sufficiently distracting, and the group ignored her tardiness in favor of exclaiming over the treat she had brought.

Once everybody had been served (except Britta, who looked a little sad when Shirley said the words “real buttercream”), Shirley slipped the rest of the plastic plates and forks back into her purse. She took her seat, and Annie looked over at her with a grateful smile. Shirley couldn’t go back in time and make everyone remember Annie’s birthday, but she _could_ bake her a birthday cake, and that was enough, for the time being.

“So, what’s the occasion?” Duncan asked brightly from his seat next to Jeff.

Everyone looked at Shirley, waiting for her answer. Most of the group appeared casually interested, no doubt remembering all the parties for various occasions (Shirley’s niece’s first bubble bath, for one) they’d held over the years. Annie, on the other hand, looked positively frightened, her eyes wide.

Shirley glanced around once, then looked back down at her cake before answering. “I thought we all might need a little celebration,” she said smoothly.

She felt Annie relax next to her, saw her smile a little out of the corner of her eye. The moment passed. They moved on.

**Author's Note:**

> This is a series in which Shirley bakes something for each member of the Save Greendale Committee during the latter half of season 5.


End file.
